News
What is news?
News Value
Criteria for news value?
Criteria
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Timeliness
Localness or proximity
Prominence or importance
Names
Size
Dollars
Consequence and/or conflict
Human interest
Inverted Pyramid
Lead with 5W – 1H
Basics on Preparing News Copy
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Page 6-7
Writing a News Release: A Checklist
Formats
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News release (2 page max)
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Feature Story
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Exclusive, special or general
Tip sheets
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General
To attract media
Fact or briefing sheets
Practice Exercise
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Small groups 3-4
Page 23 – Release A
What kind of lead?
AFS space (P: Drive)
bit
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Short for binary digit, the smallest unit of information on a machine.
The term was first used in 1946 by John Tukey, a leading statistician
and adviser to five presidents. A single bit can hold only one of two
values: 0 or 1. More meaningful information is obtained by combining
consecutive bits into larger units. For example, a byte is composed of 8
consecutive bits. Computers are sometimes classified by the number of
bits they can process at one time or by the number of bits they use to
represent addresses. These two values are not always the same, which
leads to confusion. For example, classifying a computer as a 32-bit
machine might mean that its data registers are 32 bits wide or that it
uses 32 bits to identify each address in memory. Whereas larger
registers make a computer faster, using more bits for addresses
enables a machine to support larger programs. Graphics are also often
described by the number of bits used to represent each dot. A 1-bit
image is monochrome; an 8-bit image supports 256 colors or
grayscales; and a 24- or 32-bit graphic supports true color.
Byte
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Abbreviation for binary term, a unit of storage capable of holding a
single character. On almost all modern computers, a byte is equal to 8
bits. Large amounts of memory are indicated in terms of kilobytes
(1,024 bytes), megabytes (1,048,576 bytes), and gigabytes
(1,073,741,824 bytes).
Hard Disk Drive
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The mechanism that reads and writes data on a hard disk. Hard disk
drives (HDDs) for PCs generally have seek times of about 12
milliseconds or less. Many disk drives improve their performance
through a technique called caching. There are several interface
standards for passing data between a hard disk and a computer. The
most common are IDE and SCSI.
Floppy Drive
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A soft magnetic disk. It is called floppy because it flops if you wave it
(at least, the 5¼-inch variety does). Unlike most hard disks, floppy
disks (often called floppies or diskettes) are portable, because you can
remove them from a disk drive. Disk drives for floppy disks are called
floppy drives. Floppy disks are slower to access than hard disks and
have less storage capacity, but they are much less expensive. And most
importantly, they are portable.
Floppies come in two basic sizes:
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5¼-inch: The common size for PCs made before 1987. This type of floppy
is generally capable of storing between 100K and 1.2MB (megabytes) of
data. The most common sizes are 360K and 1.2MB.
3½-inch: Floppy is something of a misnomer for these disks, as they are
encased in a rigid envelope. Despite their small size, microfloppies have a
larger storage capacity than their cousins -- from 400K to 1.4MB of data.
The most common sizes for PCs are 720K (double-density) and 1.44MB
(high-density). Macintoshes support disks of 400K, 800K, and 1.2MB.
Zip Drive
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A high-capacity floppy disk drive developed by Iomega Corporation. Zip
disks are slightly larger than conventional floppy disks, and about twice
as thick. They can hold 100 or 250 MB of data. Because they're
relatively inexpensive and durable, they have become a popular media
for backing up hard disks and for transporting large files.
CD-ROM Drive
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Abbreviation of Compact Disc-Read-Only Memory. A type of
optical disk capable of storing large amounts of data -- up to
1GB, although the most common size is 650MB (megabytes). A
single CD-ROM has the storage capacity of 700 floppy disks,
enough memory to store about 300,000 text pages.
CD-ROMs are stamped by the vendor, and once stamped, they
cannot be erased and filled with new data. To read a CD, you
need a CD-ROM player. All CD-ROMs conform to a standard size
and format, so you can load any type of CD-ROM into any CDROM player. In addition, CD-ROM players are capable of playing
audio CDs, which share the same technology.
CD-ROMs are particularly well-suited to information that
requires large storage capacity. This includes color large
software applications, graphics, sound, and especially video.
CD-R
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Short for Compact Disk-Recordable drive, a type of disk drive that can
create CD-ROMs and audio CDs. This allows users to "master" a CDROM or audio CD for publishing. Until recently, CD-R drives were quite
expensive, but prices have dropped dramatically. A feature of many
CD-R drives, called multisession recording, enables you to keep adding
data to a CD-ROM over time. This is extremely important if you want to
use the CD-R drive to create backup CD-ROMs.
To create CD-ROMs and audio CDs, you'll need not only a CD-R drive,
but also a CD-R software package. Often, it is the software package,
not the drive itself, that determines how easy or difficult it is to create
CD-ROMs.
CD-R drives can also read CD-ROMs and play audio CDs.
CD-RW
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Short for CD-ReWritable disk, a type of CD disk that enables you to
write onto it in multiple sessions. One of the problems with CD-R disks
is that you can only write to them once. With CD-RW drives and disks,
you can treat the optical disk just like a floppy or hard disk, writing
data onto it multiple times. The first CD-RW drives became available in
mid-1997. They can read CD-ROMs and can write onto today's CD-R
disks, but they cannot write on normal CD-ROMs. This means that
disks created with a CD-RW drive can only be read by a CD-RW drive.
However, a new standard called MultiRead, developed jointly by Philips
Electronics and Hewlett-Packard, will enable CD-ROM players to read
disks create by CD-RW drives.
Many experts believe that CD-RW disks will be a popular storage
medium until DVD devices become widely available.
CD-RW, CD-R and CD-ROM
Compatibility
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There are a number of compatibility issues associated with CD-RW.
First and foremost is the fact that CD-RW media are not backwardcompatible with many regular CD-ROM drives. Due to the lower
reflectivity of the CD-RW media, regular drives can have problems
reading them. In essence, the CD-RW media just does not emulate the
pits and lands of a regular pressed CD well enough to fool a standard
reader.
Another problem is that CD-RW media are recorded in a multi-session
format. Single-session disks are written an entire disk at a time, which
obviously isn't practical for a rewriteable medium. Many regular CDROM drives are multi-session compatible, but many are not.
One of the great strengths of CD-R is the fact that once you create a
disk, it can be read in basically any reasonably-modern PC that has a
CD-ROM player. Since CD-RW media does not have this large
advantage of universality, it is, in my opinion, relegated into "the pack"
of competing removable mass storage formats, such as removable hard
disks, high-capacity floppies, and magneto-optical drives. All of these
provide removable, rewriteable storage at different price points, and all
share the disadvantage of not being readily usable on PCs that don't
have the right type of special drive.